The Keystone pipeline is a red herring

The real issue is mining the tar sands, which is environmentally disastrous, carbon heavy and produces toxic crude. Unfortunately that is Canada's decision. They will continue to mine whether is is shipped by rail or pipeline.

Both opponents and proponents have wildly exaggerated their cases.  No, beyond the construction, will we see any significant number of jobs.  No the pipeline will not be more dangerous than rail shipping.

The Keystone has become a proxy for how we want to develop energy, more fossil fuels, or other less carbon intensive means.

In any case, at today's prices, each barrel of tar sands oil is sold at a loss.  No one will build a pipeline unless the price recovers.

Who Has It Better, Farm Animals or Wildlife?

At the headquarters of Denali National Park, there is an exhibit on caribou. They do not have an easy life. Four-fifths of the calves never make it to adulthood, mostly falling to predators who rip them apart and eat them alive. The survivors are plagued by swarms of biting flies and parasites that burrow tunnels in the haunches before they are weakened by age or disease, and ripped apart by a predator.

This contrasts with responsibly-raised farm animals, who have room, board, and medical care, live much longer than their cousins in the wild. They certainly die more humanely than being eaten alive, in fact they die more humanely than most of us do hooked up to machines.

The most insightful statement Pope Francis has made

“Reality,” [Pope Francis] told a large group of young people, “is superior to ideas.”

This is coming from the absolute leader of the Roman Catholic Church, which for two millennia has tried to fit real life onto the procrustean bed of dogma -- often with horrible disastrous results -- inquisition anyone?

What a concise statement of where we all go astray. The real horrors of mankind come when we attempt to impose an abstract idea, be it religion, communism, fascism, or even spreading of democracy, by force.

Richard Dawkins  and others' attack on religion is not really an attack on just religion, it is an attack on all attempts to shoehorn real peoples' lives into an abstract idea, be it religion, communism, fascism or even spreading democracy.

David Foster Wallace and Leo Tolstoy

I recently read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.  I am now one third through Anna Karenina  by Leo Tolstoy.  In common they are large books which not only tell a story, but describe a whole society.  That is all they have in common.

Infinite Jest is a near future dystopian satire about addiction. The book itself is addicting, not matter how much I wanted to, I could not put it down.  It is best described by a comment made about Richard Wagner by Gioachino Rossini, an Italian composer. "Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour."   The book drags, but it has inspired sections that are imprinted in my mind. In one a woman who attempted suicide describes her suicidal thoughts to her therapist.  This has special poignancy because the author, who spent his whole life fighting depression, later committed suicide himself.  In another section, Wallace describes the origin of the wheelchair assassins, a Canadian terrorist group all of whose members are legless. No I did not make the last sentence up.

Anna Karenina never drags but I have to resort to a list of characters to keep track of them.  Tolstoy gets slow at times but is never painful to read.